12 replies so far

Easy cutting/planing/drilling/carving. Has the tendency to blotch like pine when stained. I like it for smaller projects. Cutoffs make a great burning wood for your smoker. My BIL uses it exclusively in his Big Green Egg and I’ll put his ribs and brisket up against anybody’s.

I have used pecan on several projects and can confirm the comments above. It is an open grained wood and does not take oil based stain (such as Minwax) well. Water based dyes (such as Moser) work extremely well on it and offers a lot of color variations. The projects in the photos below were done using Mosers Medium walnut water soluable dye followed by a sealer and polyurethane.

We build kitchens out of hickory / pecan a lot and we never stain the wood. There is too much loss in natural beauty when stain application is utilized. I have stained hickory one time and the stain actually neutralized the beauty of the wood, bringing the finished product from what would have been excellent down to what I considered average. Now we never stain hickory, if a customer is looking for a stained finish I will steer them away from hickory.

As for Hickory or Pecan, as mentioned, it is very hard. Sharp blades is recommended and when shaping with less then 5 hp you would want to consider multiple passes. Have fun wood working!

Yes I have made several projects with pecan/hickory. One project was an entire wall built in consisting of shelves and a high, pool table viewing seat/bench with drawers underneath. I was fortunate enough find some really intersting grain/figure. Pecan can somtimes be a bit un-interesting in terms of grain pattern and color in my opinion.

It is not too bad to work with. Although it seemed like it may be a bit prone to splitting I can say that I did not experience that. I also did not have any issues with staining but I used a very light tone to make the grain pop a bit. I think Pecan lends itself very well to furniture styles that I would call slightly on the “rustic” side (again my opinion). Enjoy your Pecan.

Yes, I have used pecan, if you look in my projects, you can see a kitchen I did with pecan. It is hard and it is brittle, it’s in the hickory family, and it works very similiarly, only it’s just a little denser.I had no problems staining it, but I use a pigment stain such as cabot over the dye stain such as minwax… Actually I’ll use the pigments over that type of dye stain any day of the week.

A good saw blade will have no difficulty with cutting the wood, but be prepared to sharpen chisels, planer blades and so on. There will be times it will be easier to plane and scrape this wood rather than sand, though I recomend you sand afterwords just the same for stain regularity.

-- The mark of a good carpenter is not how few mistakes he makes, but rather how well he fixes them.